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Friday, 5 September 2014

So I was driving happily along, saw a road block and thought I had nothing to worry about. I have paid most of my fines, sure I might have a few fines that I hadn't paid yet, but it hadn't been that long yet.
So their Registration plate scanner beeped (first time it had happened to me so I didn't know what was happening), I got pulled over and they nice police lady said they were just going to check outstanding fines against my name. It turned out I had a "fine" for going over 80kmph in a 40kmph zone! All I understood was that I had a court order against my name

So it appears there are two stages to being able to be arrested.
Stage 1 is that you do not pay a fine and you are issued a summons.
Stage 2 is that you received the summons and did not appear in court.
You can only be arrested once it has reached stage 2.

The worst part about this is that the police apparently can print and sign a summons right on the side of the road and then arrest you immediately after you sign it (refusing to sign it makes no difference, although the Justice Project said to me that this doesn't happen, it is just another scare tactic). My problem is that I have been fined for travelling more than 30kmph above the speed limit. Apparently this is grounds for an immediate court case and if you are found guilty / pay the admission of guilt fine you will end up with a criminal record!

This sounds crazy to me, especially as I had just gone a few metres past the 40kmph sign. So I got some advice and went to the AARTO website (the best place to get the most detail about your fine) and looked up the fines. It seems there has been no summons issued yet, phew.

Some sound advice I have received so far is,

Find a criminal lawyer to engage with because you are going to need one

Pay all other outstanding fines.

Send letters to the Court and Traffic Department requesting the documents detailing the offence

Wait for the summons letter

Do not avoid road blocks

I actually paid all the outstanding fines and went through a roadblock again the other day. As it turns out they didn't pull me over, the scanner didn't beep! The real reason I was pulled over previously was because I hadn't paid fines, not because of the court orders!

Anyway, lesson learnt. I'm paying my fines from now on (well, actually trying not to get them in the first place)

Friday, 11 July 2014

Are you not making it to the end of the month with your data? Are you not sure why all your data is used in just a few days? If you want to know how to limit / control / change / get a warning when your data usage reaches a certain level then you've come to the right place. (I'm using Android 4.2.1)

The nice thing about Android is that it is built into the settings of the OS and you don't have to download any other additional programs that run in the background, draining your battery, giving you inaccurate stats (not that these stats are perfect).

In the settings I am about to show you, you will be able to change when Android warns you about your mobile data usage, set it to stop all mobile data usage, to set your mobile data usage threshold and to limit the background mobile data usage of specific appilcations.

So, on with it.
Basically go to Settings

Click on Data Usage

If you want to stop your phone from using your mobile data rather than just give you a warning. Then you just need to tap the box next to "Set mobile data limit" and you'll get the warning here below

Now you'll see two lines across the chart. One is the Warning Line and the other is the Limit Line

As you know in South Africa our mobile data usage is hectically expensive (or is it our salaries that are too low?). So we need to change these numbers. If you tap on the 5.0GB you should be presented with this screen. You can swipe up and down to increase or decrease your limit.

Alternatively just tap on the number (5120 in my example) and they keyboard will come up for you to type in your own limit. Don't worry about getting the 2GB translated in MB, when I typed in 2 and pressed enter it automatically assumed I meant 2GB.

So I've now set my data usage limit to 2GB. To change the data warning level I want to use another method. If you tap on the lines you they get thicker on the right hand side. You can then drag the whole line up and down. You can see in the second picture below that I have move the Data Limit up to 2.1GB and the Data Warning down to 1.6GB

And basically that is how you limit your data usage from inside Android. Of course it is nice to get a warning that you are getting close and that level can also be changed to your preference. I like it quite close so I would probably set it to 1.9GB.

Also the best way to find out your most offending app is to drag the white horizontal lines to the left and right. This way you can find out what app is using the most data over a certain period of time. For example if it only used all its data over one day then you know it must be because you did something on that day, but if it is consistently using all your data then you know you need to do something about it.

To analyse this you can drag the white lines to the left and right and Android will then order the apps below in terms of their data usage. The app with the highest data usage will be listed first. In the example below I have widened out the selection to include most of the month. I haven't used the mobile data on it for a while so it is not showing any usage, but I've included a shot of my wifi usage so that you will get the picture.

I hope that helps! Please leave your comments or suggestions below. I would love to help with anything else you might need assistance with.

Thursday, 3 July 2014

The price of home insulation is interesting. When I went to Builders warehouse I got three different quotes for three different sizes of Aerolite. So I sat down at my desk and drew up an excel table to get the per metre price. 100mm Aerolite at Builders was going to cost me about R50 per square metre and the first Isotherm guy I called was going to install Isotherm at R60 per square metre. The second one I called from Pretoria was all installed at R53 per square. So I went ahead without checking the facts and for some reason I thought Isotherm was better, they quoted it as being better for the environment, better at soundproofing, but no-one was willing to commit to it being better at insulation. I realise now that no-one was willing to say so because Isotherm isn't better, but no-one would give me the factual answer that it wasn't better.

So, now I've googled it after the fact and apparently the best way to compare the effectiveness of Insulation is to look at it's R-Values. This is how they compare:

R-Values comparison

Thickness

Aerolite

Isotherm

50mm

1.25

1.02

100mm

2.5

2.04

135mm

3.38

3.14

So it seems looking at the reason one buys Insulation Aerolite is still superior. They go into the whole up R value and down R value, but that is quite complicated to understand and the R-Values I have quoted here are supposed to be a combination of those two values.

Conclusion:
The reason you buy insulation is to insulate your home. Aerolite is clearly better at doing this. I am sure you can find cheaper ways of getting it installed for you than going to builders so I think Aerolite is the way to go.
A lot of people say they like to install Isotherm because it is easier to install, it's not so itchy. However this is a once off, the stuff will stay in your ceiling for many years and if it bothers you that much then pay someone to install it.

Friday, 20 June 2014

I am an avid fan of Capitec. I'm not ashamed to admit it, I mean the bank pays me to bank with them! My fees are about R30 a month AND I get at least R50 each month in interest, that excludes the interest I get from my fixed deposits (which are also much better than any other bank).

I remember when I was looking at trying to save money and I went to ABSA (my bank at the time) and asked them about fixed deposits and other savings products. They actually told me I had to pay them to put my money away! A fee to lock my money away so that they could use it to make money for themselves! Countries like the UK and China have free bank accounts, why are we so behind? If you pay a monthly fee you get amazing benefits like what FNB is offering, cash back, travel insurance, all of that. The only positive thing I can think of regarding fee based banking is that it did protect our banks somewhat during the 2008 economic crises.

Anyway, so, back to the point! The Capitec Banking App is here. I quite like the app. It looks nice and polished compared to other apps I have seen and it is much better than the Capitec Online Banking Website. The only problem is that it does sometimes get stuck loading and can take a while if your internet connection is unreliable.
When I first registered the app I ran into quite a few troubles as it did not ask me to send an sms to confirm my cell number. This could be because I was too keen and opened the app before the assistant had completed registering me or maybe it was because of my dodgy wifi mifi device I was using (out of 3G data on my phone already)

The other thing I don't like about the app is that it now replaces my pin dongle (the little device you pay R150 for when activating internet banking). I now have to use my cellphone to access my online banking. The worst part of this, and I have seen it happen to a mybroadband forum participant, is that if I change my cellphone I have to go to the branch again and re-register my new phone. I remember when my phone broke I changed phones twice in 2 weeks, I first went back to my old phone, but it was far too slow so I started to use my wife's old phone. It would have been such a pain to have to go to the branch so many times.

Monday, 2 June 2014

My Android phone broke. I had a lovely Samsung Note II and I dropped it one too many times. 1 reason why iPhone's are better than Samsung phones is that they don't break as easily. However, back to the OS's (hopefully Sony is now making more durable Android phones...). I have now been forced to use the wife's old iPhone, due to lack of readership of this blog and its money making prospects.

Stock with the iPhone you are able to track your data usage, new in IOS 7 you can even turn off which apps are able to use your mobile data. You can also do this for Android, but it's a little more complicated.

In your iPhone you can go to "Settings", "Cellular" and scroll down to see the amount of data you have used as per the screenshot.

The problem is you don't know over what period. So you scroll to the bottom and hit reset statistics and plan to check your data usage in the morning. You forget and about 2 weeks go by and you are out of data because its the end of the month and you are South African. So you check your data usage and you see you have legitimately used all your data, you just can't remember when you last reset the statistics. So what is the point?? Of course, if you want a better Data usage tracker you can always get an app like My Data Manager or Onavo

In Android, as you can see here, you can change the period, you can check back to previous periods, you can even view your Wi-Fi usage if you so choose! AND this is all built into the Operating System. You see the two lines across the Chart? You can move those with your finger and then it will tell you each app's data usage during that period. This is so useful because if Google Play Services was eating all my data and can just tap on it and restrict Background Data.

If you want to know how to setup your Data usage cycle in Android please check back on my blog soon as I'll shortly be posting about how to make the change.

You can even set it to warn you when you reach your cap or even stop your data usage entirely!

Of course, if you want to see the previous "Data Usage Cycle" you can just tap on it and you will see this drop down box. You can then select the previous month and see if that troublesome app is the same one that is constantly using up all your data.

Anyway, as I always say, an iPhone is great for people who just want the phone to work, but those who love to mess around and change settings on their phone Android is the way to go.

Please leave your comments or suggestions below, I would love to hear from you.

Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Have you ever done a search of "South Africa" in your app store? I have, I was trying to find apps that were actually relevant to the country I was staying in! As simple as that sounds it was a hard task. Searching for apps that actually reference South Africa simply brings up a bunch of rubbish apps that you would never want near your phone.

So I thought that I should tackle trying to find you all some apps that are relevant to South Africa and, having reviewed South African News what better way to carry on than with the Shopping apps. Mostly I have reviewed the Grocery Shopping Apps, but I added in Edgars because when I was almost finished typing up I saw they had an app, and it was actually the best App. I hope we can convince PnP and Checkers to put more effort into their apps.

Pick 'n PayFirst off, the PnP app is not great, I only found it useful for the smart shopper card. While you are standing in the queue you can switch your points to cash and you can load vouchers based on what you already have in your trolley. However when I tried to get the cashier to ring up the vouchers on my phone I faced the usual "I don't know what to do with that" problem.

New technology is introduced and it becomes hard to use because the shop hasn't bothered to educate it's cashiers how to ring it up. There is even an option that you can tap that tells the cashier what steps to go through and they still didn't get it. They HAD to ask someone else and I luckily eventually came right. I'm not that used to being an earlier adopter that I have the patience to teach each new cashier how to load my vouchers.

You can also choose to donate your point to charity if you like... perhaps you'd just like to see general promotions as well. Not something that I worry to check, I must say.

What else do i expect the app to do? I dunno, most American shop apps these days have recipes, shopping lists and so much more. I can't help bumping into them when I'm trying to find a decent shopping list app here in South Africa.

Checkers has basically the same app as PnP, who copied who? Perhaps you can tell me in the comments section. You sign up, you get a bunch of coupons which seem to be worth a whole lot of money (I can save a whole R2746.50! Yay!), you can select you want and key in your WCode at the cashier. I haven't actually shopped with this app, but I imagine you will get the same problem when you present this to a cashier, what do I do with this!
I dunno, maybe Checkers does better with training their staff.

Here you can see the Coupons that are available and basically you just select them so that there is a huge tick and tap Redeem all Coupons at the top. You then can go to the Cashier and type in your WCode. Who knows what the cashier has to do first to allow you to type in your WCode!

The Woolworths app seems to be the best and worst of them. I guess its more like a credit card app. You can get your statements of what you purchased, but that is it. Of course, you need to have an account with Woolworths to do this.

So the Woolworths app is not really a shopping app, but more an app for its financial services. I simply include it here because Woolworths is a shop and they have an app. Nothing much else to say I'm afraid.

Having only discovered this app at the end of writing this article I am pleasantly surprised that Edgars has actually added a shopping trolley. You can scan your items as you shop. I would use this to see how much I have in my trolley and am going to spend at the check-out. However you can use it to "order" the items and have them delivered to the store. I'm not sure how long this "delivery" takes, but it would be weird if it took more than a few minutes, you have to scan or type in the barcode to add items to your basket.

So it has it's problems, but at least they are doing more than the other shops! You can view your Thank-U Points, you can see your account info and you can scan their items to add to a list of items. You might even want to just scan items to add them to a wish list for the end of the month!

So certainly, my vote goes to the Edgars app. At least its more useful than giving you vouchers or telling you your balance. It actually does both AND you can create a shopping list, whoa, stop the bus! What over acheivers!

Please leave a comment below or share the post on Facebook if you like this or have a favourite shopping app.

Saturday, 26 April 2014

If you've been reading News24 of late you'll find that they have a new app for the elections (download here if you want). This kinda makes me excited in that it seems South Africans will be able to participate more in the events around them.

So this got me thinking that perhaps it was time for a review of the news apps in South Africa. News24 doesn't get me excited, their news is fast, it's just generally boring. Maybe is just the way they tell it...

So, I've downloaded eNCA, EWN, Business Day and News24. (You can click on any of the headings to be directed to the relevant app in the Play store)

With over 500 000 downloads this is by far the most popular local News app available. While I like their app, as I mentioned already, their news is told in a very straight forward manner that doesn't interest me. Its like a history teacher running through event dates. I switch off pretty fast, often just the headlines are enough for me!
One of my pet hates in this app and most SA News apps is that every time you turn your phone (turn it sideways or upright again) it automatically scrolls back to the top, to the top of the story, to the top of the list of articles. Drives me insane! I don't read the news every single day, so when I do I tend to scroll to find an interesting story, but having to scroll down to where I was each and every time is really infuriating! (I like to lie down and read). You also have to scroll back to where you were when you finsihed reading a story and go back to the list of articles.

Of course the best thing about News24 is the reason we all downloaded News24. It was that it was the best at getting the news to you first. Things appeared so quickly that it seems like days had gone by when you watched the news that night, it was old news already.

I've had this news app for some time as well because I was looking for something with better content than News24. While I like the content, the app hasn't really been updated in.... like... ever. It does say November 2013 in the Play Store, but there was no change to the app functionality. It does nothing new and has the same infuriating "starting always at the top" functionality.

So in conclusion there is not much to say. This app has some interesting news, but the lack of updates makes you feel Business Day doesn't want you to consume their content this way. With less than 10 000 downloads no wonder BD doesn't care much about it, this is even less downloads than the new News24 Elections app! They've just done it to put it out there and tick the box.

This seemed like a great app when I first opened it, but that was as far as I got. I only opened it and never opened it again. Opening it again it seems that they really want to use it to drive you to their DSTV Channel. The opening splash screen states this very clearly.

This app is solid though and provides a lot of good news coverage. This is reflected in that it has surpassed Business Day's app in regard to downloads with between 10 000 and 50 000 downloads.

This to me is the "new on the scene" app of local South African News apps. I managed to discover this when I downloaded the News24 Elections App (ironically), so I checked it out. Have a look at this huge spacing!

It could be because of the phablet I am using, they probably haven't optimised for all screen sizes and the variations of Android. That should come with time, but I found myself immediately captured by the stories, and you can get the latest news bulletin streaming to your phone with just a few taps.
I think this app is great and is worth checking out. My favourite thing about this app is that you can easily carry on from where you left off browsing, in fact, it is so integrated that as you browse the story and get to the end if it, if you keep scrolling down you will go straight into the list of stories that were below the story you are reading. It was so smooth and seamless that I didn't realise what was happening until I was already back in the Story List and carrying on from right where I left off!
Here is a screen shot of it.

I highly recommend this app as a result, good content and a good browsing experience.

If you have any other Local News Apps you are using please post them below in the comments and I would love to check them out and add them to the list.
Also let me know your favourite News App. Personally I love News Republic for my International News. Don't really know why, but it is mostly because you can tailor the News you receive. There are plenty other news apps now that allow you to tailor your news.

Sunday, 20 April 2014

You know that feeling, your old device is getting an update, a breath of new life into your device so that you can catch up to the rest of the world with new features and exciting interface.

You run the update and start to explore it..... then.......everything is so much slower than before. Disappointment! Big Mistake. So in my search online I found that the Samsung Galaxy S4 has then same problem as my Samsung Galaxy Note II (or Note 2 if you prefer).

A lot of the comments suggest making use of cleaners that close apps regularly, I didn't think this was the problem because I had used the Android functionality to manually close all open apps and free up memory, sure my phone was a bit faster, but then I used the apps again and the phone simply immediately got slower again.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I think the problem is really again a case of a slower processor trying to use an OS that requires a fast processor. (the reason I remember swearing about Windows updates)
So to compensate for this you need to change the "Animation Scales". You do this by enabling the "Developer options" Option (this is enabled by tapping the Build number of your phone 7 times). Then you reduce the three Animator Scales to 0.5 or 0 if you so choose. I found that 0.5 was enough.

Thursday, 17 April 2014

It is actually very easy to renew your vehicle license. I always feel sorry for all the people in the queue down at the Vehicle licensing department trying to get new License Discs. It is always a very long queue and I'm sure they stand for at least an hour trying to accomplish the task. Not that you don't sometimes stand for an hour in the queue in the Post Office! At least at the Post Office, if the queue is long, you can quite easily come back later. Also there is often a separate queue for MVL's!

But, Yes, you can renew your licence at your local post office. If you don't have the Notice of Renewal they send in the post you can simply fill in a form at the Post Office and they will still be able to process your renewal. However, if you have any problems it will be because of outstanding fines that you will have to sort out first (of course they don't tell you this while you are at the Post Office, you just get a grunt and a shrug of the shoulders). Then you won't be able to avoid going to the Vehicle Licensing Centre.